How Ukrainians Saved Their Capital
Last edited Thu May 5, 2022, 06:26 AM - Edit history (1)
I’d met Anastasia several years ago in Paris, through my wife, when they had both belonged to an academic consortium sponsored by the European Research Council. Although Anastasia, a graduate student in political science, had spent most of her life in France, she was born in Kyiv and returned there regularly. When Russian forces launched multiple simultaneous offensives against Ukraine, on February 24th, I called Anastasia to ask after her relatives. One prong of the attack was advancing on the capital, and missiles had already started landing there. Anastasia was preparing to travel to Kyiv, and invited me to go with her.
Two days later, in Paris, at 7:30 A.M., I arrived outside a Métro station near the Place d’Italie, where people were loading boxes of food and other provisions into the luggage compartment of a commercial bus. I spotted Anastasia, wearing a backpack and smoking a cigarette. She told me that she’d been returning home on this bus, which was owned by a Ukrainian man and which departed every Sunday, for the past several years. The voyage took more than thirty hours but cost only eighty euros. Normally, the passengers were immigrants visiting friends and family; now they were mostly young men and women going back to fight.
In response to the Russian invasion, the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, had declared martial law and ordered a general mobilization, forbidding males between the ages of eighteen and sixty to leave the country. Ukrainians who were abroad, of course, could have chosen to remain so. But every seat on the bus was occupied. The man across the aisle from Anastasia and me, named Petro, was a thirty-three-year-old construction worker who had lived in France for eight years. He was bound for his home town, Ivano-Frankivsk, where Russian missiles had recently targeted the airport. He planned to spend one night with his parents, then report for duty.
As we traversed Luxembourg and Germany, the driver stopped at a gas station every four or five hours, to let us use the rest room and buy food; Petro neither ate nor slept, and his anxiety seemed to increase as we neared Ukraine. He had never fired a weapon. “I don’t know where they’re going to send me,” he told us midway through Poland, his hands trembling. “I don’t know what’s going to happen to me.” Embarrassed by the tears welling in his eyes, he explained, “Not everyone is ready for this.
From the New Yorker Magazine...long read but a in depth look at the Ukraine war
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/05/09/how-ukrainians-saved-their-capital
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